The Almost Rock Star (A Ghost Story) (DRAFT)

The Almost Rock Star (A Ghost Story) 7, Three Murders

Chapter Seven

Three Murders

He didn’t even have the decency to cover my half-naked body after he was through with me. My blood looked black on the pine needles. I just couldn’t seem to get the picture of my black blood or my half-decomposed body out of my mind. 

I wasn’t an ugly rotting corpse. Some hideous zombie from a Stephen King movie. 

I was brunette and beautiful. 

I don’t like saying so, because everybody always then calls me a self-centered narcissist or Justine Bieber. As in Justin Bieber’s rotten twin sister. But I was born that way, an awesome brunette, and I don’t see any reason not to take advantage of being beautiful. 

Becoming a rock star was just part of my plan for my life. I was going to make it really big, like Taylor Swift. I was just like her. Sort of. We had exactly the same birthday. December 13. The main difference is that when she was a kid, her parents supported her singing, paying for private schools and music lessons and trips to Nashville when she was an eighth grader. 

I was working from about age 13. Every day after school I went to Auntie Em’s Kitchen, a cupcake shop and bakery in Palm Beach run by a woman who I thought had seen The Wizard of Oz way too many times. Emma Bradley. She’s 43 and has seen this old movie 77 times. 

When Oz The Great and Powerful came out recently, I thought of her. I went and bought a pink frosty cupcake and asked her about it. She loved it, she said, cutting up cupcake samples and talking with her mouth full of cupcake, but it’s not the old movie. I went home and wrote “Luv Oz,” a song about me and my lover going to the wizard of Oz and asking if we should be married. 

Luv Oz

When he said no, 

we got married anyway, and now I’m wondering, wondering 

how he knew. 

That wiz, That man Wiz, That Oz. 

How he knew, 

how he knew, 

how he knew. 

Pink cupcakes and new movies, 

how he knew. 

That’s just a fragment of the song. It was pretty popular.

So I was working from the moment I left school until about 8 p.m. Then I faced a whole list of my weekly house chores and then I had homework to do. No singing lessons like Taylor Swift. I sang Madonna while I vacuumed. We even had a maid, if you can believe it. We passed each other, me and Geraldine, cleaning. Sometimes in the laundry room. I had to keep my “suite” clean on my own, my Mom said. She did while she was growing up, and had decided it was good for character. Yeah right. Like her character was so improved by those years of housecleaning. My Mom was a super primo fako, as Aja would say.